Surgical devices which align tools (e.g., drill bits, trochars) to bone plate holes are known in the art. Many of these devices are not adjustable. Some of these known devices can be adjusted by the surgeon or operator to tailor it for use with a number of different bone plates which have varying hole placement arrangements or patterns. These adjustable devices, however, require the surgeon or operator to manually adjust the guide to suit the particular plate being used. Making these adjustments can be tedious and often requires trial and error. Furthermore, even after a surgeon adjusts one of these devices, the alignment between the guide and a respective plate hole may be imprecise. These problems become even more salient when the device being used is intended to align a tool (e.g., a drill bit) with so-called bone plate “combination holes.” Indeed, it appears that no existing alignment device is designed for, or even particularly compatible with, a plate that has combination holes. A “combination hole,” as used here, means any kind of hole in which there are multiple “hole positions” any one of which a surgeon can drill or operate through. For an example, see the combination holes disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,669,701 and the combination holes disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,719,759, the specifications of which are hereby incorporated by reference.
There thus exists a need for a device that will align a surgical tool (e.g., drill bit) with a bone plate hole or that can be “adjusted” or aligned with a bone plate hole or a portion of a bone plate hole with minimal effort and maximum precision. This need is especially evident when a bone plate having combination holes is used. The present invention addresses this problem and others by providing an aiming arm which has aligning bores, whose arrangement matches or corresponds to the arrangement of holes of a particular bone plate type. When adjustment is needed, for example when a bone plate that has combination holes is being used, the present invention may provide an aiming arm that has guide bores, each guide bore having multiple (i.e., at least 2) preset positions in which to introduce or position a guide sleeve, each position providing for alignment with a particular, different hole portion. Because the positions are preset, maneuvering each guide sleeve to the desired position is very easy and takes a very short amount of time.